HELEN FRANKENTHALER: Helen Observes, Helen Experiments, Helen Tells Stories

IMPORTANT: DO NOT REVEAL TITLES UNTIL AFTER DISCUSSION!

Slide 1: Helen Frankenthaler in her Studio

 Take a moment to look closely. What do you see here? This is a photograph of the artist Helen Frankenthaler with some of her artworks. The photograph was taken in 1952 in her studio.  Do you know what a studio is?  How do you think she might have created these artworks?  What do you notice about the size of these artworks?  Anything else?

Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York in 1928, and grew up in a wealthy Manhattan family. She had two older sisters. Her father was a NY State Supreme Court judge and her mother was an immigrant from Germany. Frankenthaler showed an early ability and interest in art, which her parents encouraged. She attended progressive, experimental schools. During summer vacations with her family, she developed an appreciation for nature, particularly landscape, sea, and sky, which later informed her art.

Frankenthaler was among the most influential artists of the mid-20th century. She was influenced by abstract expressionist painting practices, and developed her own style.

Slide 2: Mountains and Sea, 1952, Oil paint and charcoal, Nearly 7 ft by 9 ft

Helen Frankenthaler was a fearless artist in a time when not many women called themselves artists, or were able to show their work to the world in galleries or museums.

 (DO NOT REVEAL TITLE) Take a minute to observe this painting. Can you find a word or idea to describe it?  Is this painting abstract? Why?  What do you see that makes you think of the words and ideas you suggested?  What do you think Helen was looking at when she made this painting?  (OK TO REVEAL TITLE) Now that you know the title, how does it describe what you see? Do you see it differently?

Helen painted Mountains and Sea when she was just 23. It was her first large painting. She had just returned from Nova Scotia where she had painted lots of watercolors of the land and sea that she observed. She returned to her studio and unfurled an enormous bare canvas on the floor. She made a charcoal sketch of some lines and loops. And then she mixed her oil paints so they would become watery like the ocean. She put away her brushes and – very slowly and very carefully – she poured the paint onto the canvas, letting it soak in and roll and flow around until it absorbed.

 Can you see anything from the nature in this painting? Something she might have observed in Nova Scotia?

Helen said: “There are no rules (in art). That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.”

Slide 3: Helen Frankenthaler making a painting in her studio

 What is Helen doing?  How is it different from how other artists might make their paintings? (At an easel, on the wall, with the canvas already stretched onto a frame, can you see the canvas unrolled on the floor?)  How do you think the paint is similar or different to other artists you might have seen? (thinner, thicker, applied with a brush, poured)  Do you know the names of any other artists who might have painted in unusual ways? (Jackson Pollack, other Abstract Expressionists who were working in the same era as Helen)  Now that you’ve seen Mountains and Sea, is it a surprise that Helen creates her artworks this way? Have you ever created paintings this way?

Helen Frankenthaler was influenced by a style of painting that emerged after World War II called Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock was an important Abstract Expressionist because he is known for throwing and splattering paint across the surface of canvases that he placed on the floor of his studio. Jackson Pollock influenced Helen when she was young. Like Pollock, Helen worked on the floor on enormous canvases. But Helen moved on and invented her own special technique!

Helen is known for inventing the soak-stain technique. She thinned paint so it was more viscous than paint in the tube. Do you know what viscous means? It means when liquids like paint or maple syrup are thick and sticky, but still liquidy. This enabled Helen to wash the paints across the canvas so that they soaked in and merged with the canvas.

Helen said that her artwork had to do with “pouring paint” and “staining paint.” And, that “it’s a kind of marrying the paint into the canvas itself, so they became one and the same.” Slide 4: Jacob’s Ladder, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 6.5 feet by 9 ft

This painting is hanging at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Visit it!

 Do you recognize anything in this painting?  Can you describe how she made it?

Jacob’s Ladder is similar in a lot of ways to Mountains and Sea. It’s huge. It is 6.5 feet wide by 9 feet tall! Is there anything you see in your classroom that is as large as her painting? She made it using the same process of diluting her oil paints and pouring them on a canvas on the floor.

Helen said her paintings were “filled with ideas about landscape, space, arrangement, perspective, repetition, flatness, light” and “I think of my pictures as explosive landscapes, worlds, and distances held on a flat surface.” What does she mean?

The title of this work refers to a story in the Bible. It’s in the book of Genesis. Jacob had a dream in which he saw a ladder reaching toward heaven. Can you see the ladder? Can you see Jacob? Can you see the explosiveness of the forms and paint? Maybe! Maybe not!

Slide 5: The Bay, 1963, acrylic on canvas, almost 7 feet by 7 feet

 This painting looks very different from the last two. Can you describe how?  Can you name how many shades of blue you see? (Violet, indigo, sky blue, royal blue, navy blue…) Green? (moss, mint, forest, grass, chartreuse…)  How do you think the paint was so many shades of green and blue? Thinner or thicker paint? More time on the canvas to soak in makes darker or lighter shades? Different colors from different tubes or buckets of paint?  (OK to reveal title) Can you see “The Bay”? Or land? Sky?

In the 1960s, there was an invention that helped Helen change the way her paintings looked. In the past, like artists for hundreds of years, Helen used oil paint. These paints dried slowly and were difficult to dilute, to make more viscous. In the 1960s, artists were able to buy a different kind of paint called Acrylic. These paints diluted very easily and they dry very fast. These paints gave Helen more flexibility. It enabled her to be more abstract. It enabled her to achieve lighter and darker colors and for the paint to sink into the canvas more fully.

Helen might have asked herself: “what is a painting, exactly?” Perhaps she answered, “A painting is paint, and canvas, and color and nothing more.” Can a painting be just about PAINT? Many artists of her generation asked themselves this very question. How could their art show the answer?? Slide 6: Nature Abhors a Vacuum, 1973, acrylic on canvas, More than 8 feet by 9 feet

 (OK to reveal title) Can anyone describe what this title means? It’s complicated! What does the word abhor mean?  Do you think Helen was looking or remembering nature when she painted this? What do you see that makes you think so or not?

Even though Helen’s paintings are fully abstract (we don’t really recognize anything in them), once she starts to use acrylic paint, she very carefully chooses titles that tell us a story.

She actually didn’t make this title up herself. It is a quotation from a very famous philosopher (or thinker) named Aristotle who lived in ancient Greece thousands of years ago. Helen was very influenced by things she saw and also by things she read by poets and philosophers. When Aristotle said this, he meant that all natural things hate a vacuum. And by vacuum he meant empty space. Put it together: Nature hates empty space! So, Helen thought that even the empty areas of canvas are important, just like Aristotle felt that empty space is part of nature.

 Can you think of something in our world that seems empty, but is actually made up of something? (Air? Space?).  Can you think of a way to paint that? How did Helen paint that? (By leaving the canvas blank or leaving spaces between colors)

And here’s something else to think about. So many years ago, our smart man Aristotle said this about art: “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”

Slide 7: A Green Thought in a Green Shade, 1981, acrylic on canvas, more than 9 feet by 11 feet

 What do you think Helen was trying to represent when she titled this “A Green Thought in a Green Shade”?  What elements of (a garden, a forest, nature) do you see?  How do you think she applied the green paint?  How do you think she applied the other colorful bits?  How is this painting different or similar to The Bay or Nature Abhors a Vacuum?

With the title A Green Thought in a Green Shade, Helen hints at a story but she doesn’t give us all the details. She allows us to figure it out for ourselves.

The title here is also a quotation she took from someone else. The title is from a poem that is more than 400 years old by the poet Andrew Marvell. It’s one of his most famous lines. Many people think he meant that people think most clearly about nature when they’re actually outside in nature. So, we can think about nature best when we’re sitting in a garden or in the shade of a tree. How about you? Would you paint nature best if you were in it and looking at it?

When Helen was asked about her subject matter, she said: “I know (that) I can draw you just the way you look. I mean I can do a tree or a face or a chair. But I think for a while to concentrate and relax with realism, then at some point it freed me to let my wrist and heart and eye go to do something enormous and abstract.”